The lure of a leaky boat

HE knows the voyage on an old fishing boat will be risky but the prospect of help with a home, plus cash, is enough for Hazim Jaffra to head for Australia.

Yet his son Hussain, 9, is afraid to travel by boat.

Hazim, 36, and Hussain have been in the village of Puncak for three months. Here, those who have applied for refugee status via organisations like UNHCR talk of how the wait - sometimes years long - seems never-ending. Others note that people travelling by boat are rewarded with quicker entry.

"I want to bring my son to Australia to give him a better life, it is that simple," Hazim said.

But little Hussain's lively spirit is crushed every time the idea of boat travel is mentioned. The Afghan boy has heard countless stories while in Puncak.

"I am scared of drowning, very worried," he said. "I do not want to die, I want to come safe."

Hussain wants nothing more than to be in Australia and make new friends.

"I left my friends behind, I want to come to Australia and play with the Australian children," he said.

A few minutes down the road, three sisters and a mother lie on wafer-thin mattresses on the floor - crying.

The Mazraeh family are an example of people following the rules: they have been granted refugee status by the UNHCR but were recently denied entry to Australia under the humanitarian resettlement regime. That much progress has taken 3 1/2 years in Indonesia.

They fled Iran amid the risk of torture and imprisonment after the daughters lost their virginity before marriage and their father, who was killed a few months ago after being on the run for several years, began to follow the minority Sunni Islam.

Asylum seekersSource:The Daily Telegraph

The youngest, cheeky 17-year-old Atikah, desperately wants to travel to Australia to be with her 26-year-old boyfriend Ali Saheb Abdulnabi in Sydney's west.

"I would come on a boat to be with my boyfriend," she said.

But that is not an option for this teenage girl, still under her mother's watch.

Azam Marzban refuses to let any of her children travel by sea.

"It not safe enough, we will wait and do this properly," she said. "It is hard this way but it is the right thing to do."

Mr Abdulnabi, a glass delivery worker who came to Australia by sea in March 2010, said the seven-day journey was the most frightening experience of his life - his boat filling with water just 48 hours into the voyage.

Mr Abdulnabi was held on Christmas Island for 12 months before being sent to Adelaide to study English. He wants to marry his girlfriend, who he met while in Indonesia.

"It is unfair that I came here on an illegal boat and am in Sydney with a car, job and friends and she is still in Indonesia waiting more than three years," he said.

An immigration department spokesman declined to talk about the Mazraeh family's application, other than to say cases were treated on their merits and only the most "compelling" files were rubber-stamped. It was stressed, however, that more would be allowed into Australia from Indonesia after the government recently increased the number of UNHCR-mandated refugees being accepted.

But that doesn't stop those without refugee status continuing to board old fishing boats.